adolescent terror of "a narrowing system of responsibilities" fled through drink, drugs, and reckless pleasure — the…
echoes
From: Laughing with Kafka
- Early text: Adolescence is "the single most stressful and
frightening period of human development", when "the adulthood we claim to crave
begins to present itself as a real and narrowing system of responsibilities and
limitations"; the American response is escape into "falling-down drinking and
drugging and reckless driving and rampant fucking". [fn 2, 2a]
- IJ echo: The addiction substrate entire — substances as flight from an
unbearable interior (Kate Gompert's marijuana and the psychic pain she knows
simply as "It", scene 135); the
terrified adolescent athletes of Enfield Tennis Academy; the continuity the
novel insists on between the pleasures that entertain and the pleasures that
addict.
- Weight: shared-preoccupation